United Business Media, the specialist publishing and events group, is abandoning the UK after 90 years to take advantage of the more favourable tax regime in Ireland.

The move by the company is the second snub to the UK's tax regime in a month following the decision of drugs group Shire said to move its parent company to Ireland. Other companies including GlaxoSmithKline have also warned that the UK's business environment may not be conducive to their staying registered here.

UBM's defection will come as a nasty shock to the government as one of its own advisers sits on the UBM board as a non-executive director.

Lord Sandy Leitch, made a Labour peer in 2004, is an unlikely individual to be advocating removing taxation from the UK economy: the son of a Scottish coal miner, he and his family were plunged into poverty when his father died.

But UBM admitted Monday that it is creating a new holding company based in Jersey that will have its tax residence in Ireland. Corporation tax rates in Ireland stand at only 12.5% compared with 28% in the UK.

UBM, which owns brands from PR Newswire and TechWeb to Property Week and the Publican, has grown extensively through acquisition while selling UK businesses such as Express Newspapers and its stake in Channel Five. It now operates in more than 30 countries worldwide and generates more than 85% of its profits outside the UK.

"Consequently, the board of UBM now believes that the long term interests of UBM and its shareholders are best served by the adoption of an international holding company corporate structure that domiciles UBM's parent company in the Republic of Ireland, which has a less complex system of taxation," the company said yesterday.

"In contrast, the UK tax system imposes tax on all companies in a worldwide group, and consequently UBM has had to manage the interaction between the UK tax system and the tax systems of the multiple countries in which UBM operates. This has given rise to both significant compliance costs and risks of inadvertent tax charges arising."

UBM is also still locked in a legal fight with HM Reveue & Customs over an estimated £80m tax bill related to the company's disposal of its British regional newspaper operations back in 1998. After 10 years of legal wrangling, UBM lost a high court appeal last year but then appealed again. The case was heard in February and judgment is still awaited. UBM's last set of report and accounts quotes the company's effective tax rate as 17%.

According to the same report and accounts, it made pretax profits of just £170m, resulting in a tax bill of £21.5m, according to the group's profit and loss account. The company actually paid out just £5.3m in tax during the year, according to its cashflow statement.